Bounty0x Project and ICO Review

What is Bounty0x?

Bounty0x is a decentralized bounty hunting platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. This platform allows anyone to manage bounty programs, and allows bounty hunters to receive payment for completing bounties. As a refresher, bounties are rewards given for completing a specific task. In the cryptocurrency world, this could be sharing Facebook posts, creating Tweets, or making YouTube videos about a specific project. If you want more details around bounty campaigns, check out my article on “how to invest in cryptocurrencies with $0 using bounties”.

The current bounty systems used by most cryptocurrency projects are terrible. They typically involve a high volume of manual work for both the bounty campaign managers and bounty hunters. Not to mention the excessive cost of hiring a bounty campaign manager.

An example is having to post your activity every week in a forum. This activity is then manually checked by the bounty manager. After the checks are complete, they update a Google Sheet with the results. Imagine being the bounty manager and having to keep track of thousands of people and their activity. Some drop out, some get more followers, some do multiple campaigns, and the list goes on.

To get an idea of the mess, I posted 2 screenshots from the Bounty0x white paper below. The 1st shows a shot of a spreadsheet a bounty manager would use to track participants. The 2nd is what a bounty hunter must navigate to find a bounty. Luckily, Bounty0x is solving for these headaches.

The Bounty0x Platform

To alleviate the problems mentioned above, Bounty0x is streamlining the bounty campaign process. Part of this will come from automated reporting of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media activity. Another part comes from providing a central and reliable place for everyone involved in the process to go. Payments will be handled efficiently because there will not be any “spreadsheet” tracking to deal with. Lastly, the structure and reputation system are going to be key to the overall success. There are 3 key players in their system:

Bounty Hunters – The user who completes bounties a Bounty Host has provided.

Bounty Sheriffs – The user who validates submissions of a Bounty Hunter. They will need to stake BNTY tokens to have access to do this. Sheriffs will also receive a portion of the fees generated.

While the key players are like what you currently find, it is the platform that makes the difference. There is now 1 central location for all participants to use with functionality built specifically for bounty campaigns. The ranking and reputation system will cut down on the spam accounts and low-quality producers. It will also protect bounty hunters from signing up to “scam” campaigns.

The Bounty0x Token (BNTY)

There will be a total supply of 500Mil BNTY. BNTY is an ERC-20 token, so you can store it in your private Ethereum wallet. If you don’t have one, check out this guide on setting up an Ethereum wallet. It is a utility token that serves 3 primary purposes.

Super Bounties – Bounty Hunters need to stake BNTY to access these special bounties. If the submission is rejected, a portion of the BNTY they staked is lost.

Bounty Reviews – Sheriffs need to stake BNTY to be able to review bounties. If they incorrectly review a submission, a portion of the BNTY they staked is lost.

Premium Features – Startups will need to purchase BNTY to unlock additional features. They can also use these to hire additional services, such as community management.

There will be a quarterly buy-back program. Bounty0x is using fees generated on the platform to do this. It should help stabilize the BNTY price for the staking mechanism.

Bounty0x ICO Details

The ICO is broken up into a pre-sale and main sale. The pre-sale happened on 11/20/1017 and had a cap of $250,000 that was reached. The main sale will take place on 12/15/2017 and has a cap of $1.5Mil. There is a whitelist (already closed) that gets access on 12/15 and anyone not on this list will need to wait until 12/16. Contributions will need to be made in ETH.

The token allocation is setup a little different than most other ICOs. The pre-sale sold 3.8% of the 500Mil tokens, and the main sale will sell 18.2% of them. This means 22%, or 110,000,000 go to the public. The team will receive 30% (18-month vesting), advisors 3% (6-month vesting), and the remaining 45% are frozen for 18 months. The frozen tokens are reserved for future bounties, balancing the burn rate, and hiring future team members. Here is a visual breakdown of the distribution:

There was no explicit breakdown of the fund allocation. However, the funds will be split across development, operational, marketing, and legal expenses. This is ok though because they will be providing quarterly updates on the use of their contributions. They are also providing key statistics with this report, so investors can make informed decisions.

Bounty0x Team

The team currently has 3 members and 4 advisors. Part of the contributions from the crowd sale will go towards hiring more members. They have already built an Alpha platform and done very well with a small team, so it will be great to see what they do with an expanded team.

Angelo Adam, Pascal Thellmann, and Deniz Dalkillic are all Co-founders of Bounty0x. Angelo is the CEO and brings experience as an Attorney, District0x community manager, and member of the Digital Ledger Defense Coalition. Pascal is the CMO. Pascal’s background includes PR and Marketing on crypto based projects, CoinTelegraph contributor, and co-founder of a successful German ecommerce site. Deniz is the CTO. His background includes working as a software engineer at Thomson Reuters and working on an Applied Innovation team on Blockchain based projects.

Summary:

This is a niche project and no other platform offers a solution to the current issues around bounty campaigns. This gives Bounty0x a huge first-mover advantage. Their platform has the potential to save time and money for all participants, so there should also be good demand for it. The crowd sale starts soon, so be sure to check out their links below and read more about Bounty0x!